The rhythm of microbial adaptation

Philip Gerrish ()
Additional contact information
Philip Gerrish: Theoretical Biology and Biophysics, T-10, Mailstop K710, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Nature, 2001, vol. 413, issue 6853, 299-302

Abstract: Abstract The evolutionary biologist “studies the steps by which the miraculous adaptations so characteristic of every aspect of the organic world have evolved”1. But the general nature of such adaptive steps is still unclear. Evolution is often thought to be random and dependent on unpredictable events2. In this light, one might expect the steps taken by adaptation to be completely random, both biologically and temporally. Here I present a mathematical derivation to show that, on the contrary, adaptive steps can have fairly strong rhythm. I find that the strength of the adaptive rhythm, that is its relative temporal regularity, is equal to a constant that is the same for all microbial populations. As a consequence, numbers of accumulated adaptations are predicted to have a universal variance/mean ratio. The theory derived here is potentially applicable to the study of molecular evolution.

Date: 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35095046 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:413:y:2001:i:6853:d:10.1038_35095046

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35095046

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().